Product in the age of AI: Three bold predictions for the future of product management
A bevy of senior product leaders from companies like Walmart, Uber, and Hertz gathered yesterday at the Marriott Marquis in downtown San Francisco for the CPO Summit. The Summit focused on the latest trends, tools, and product strategies—with a particular emphasis on how AI is transforming product management workflows to help teams deliver better products to market, faster.
Anthony Maggio, VP of Product Management at Airtable, spoke at the event, sharing his vision for the future of product management and his perspective on the product landscape today. Anthony made three predictions for how AI will transform product strategy, reshape industry dynamics, and further elevate the role of Product Managers (PMs). His session also included actionable strategies for leveraging AI capabilities to drive innovation across the product development lifecycle.
AI adoption is increasingly urgent for product leaders
For those gathered at yesterday’s CPO summit there was a shared sentiment that the confluence of digital transformation and rapidly expanding AI capabilities will have profound implications for their businesses. A feeling of urgency was palpable in the room as leaders shared examples of using AI to quickly parse mountains of customer feedback, unlock previously hidden insights, and optimize resourcing across different product teams.
What is our current macro environment?
The last decade has ushered in a new age of digital evolution with every single company offering some form of digital product. Traditional banks and major retailers like Bank of America, Nike, and Sam’s Club have fully embraced this digital shift. They're innovating digital experience to improve customer satisfaction—you can chat in real time with financial experts via your phone’s Bank of America app; use GPS to track runs with friends in the Nike app; and enjoy 24/7 shopping with the Sam's Club digital storefront.
Now, AI is accelerating digital product development even further: By lowering the barriers to entry, the latest generation of LLMs are creating unprecedented opportunities to build more effective products, by applying AI to create novel solutions to customer problems.
Anthony has an intersectional vantage point of these industry-wide changes. First, as a software company building industry-leading AI products like their recently launched Airtable Cobuilder. And second, as a dedicated partner to CPOs across many industries who are actively leveraging Airtable’s no code platform to build and manage their own product development lifecycles. Anthony was clear that every role, across every industry, is going to be impacted by this change. And, because the coming innovations are developing so rapidly, he timeboxed his three predictions against a horizon of only three years into the future.
Three Predictions for the Future of Product
Trend 1: AI will drive product strategy
Anthony’s first prediction was that “AI powered product strategy will quickly become the norm.” Real-time data was once a double edged sword—amazing to have, but also overwhelming in volume and costly to analyze. Now, thanks to AI, this data is both containable and actionable.
Where previously, user research was outdated almost the moment it was written, now PMs can have a real-time pulse on the voice and sentiment of their customers at scale. That pulse empowers PMs to make decisions on where to invest resources for maximum impact. Anthony explained how product managers can input surveys, app store reviews, seller feedback, customer calls, and even community forum data and use AI to parse this mountain of information in minutes—as opposed to days or weeks.
Anthony predicts this is only the tip of the iceberg: AI will accelerate and strengthen every stage of the product development lifecycle. He highlighted that AI is making it easier and faster to generate product requirement briefs; to match roadmap initiatives to strategic goals; to send launch updates to the rest of the company; to manage resourcing and budget across multiple product teams; and to continuously improve the product experience.
Anthony acknowledges that changing processes is hard, especially at some of the largest enterprises, but he sees the most innovative product orgs as leaders in mandating top-down change. He predicts that these early adopters will reap the benefits with faster time-to-market and more impactful products that better solve customer pain points. On the flip side, companies that resist this opportunity will lose out and shrink in the face of rising, AI-driven agility.
It was clear to the product leaders in the room that it is incumbent upon them to push their teams with top-down emphasis to change the way they operate. And this change can’t merely be a performative or superficial one where a company bolts on a chatbot feature and starts calling themselves an AI business. Instead, to unlock true agility and innovation, product teams will have to meaningfully redefine their entire digital product strategy—embedding AI across internal operations and external customer experiences.
Trend 2: AI will accelerate category disruption cycles
Anthony predicts that AI will help teams solve previously unsolvable problems by fundamentally changing the user experience paradigms.
He told a story about overcoming the "blank slate" customer challenge at Airtable. Anthony explained that, as an open-ended platform where you can build any type of app, Airtable had a user activation challenge. The blank slate could be daunting if you didn’t generally understand the fundamentals of software development.
He recounted how, over the last 3.5 years he watched many product teams attempt to increase new user activation by leveraging templates, and with assisted onboarding and pre-made apps. But there was a problem with all these approaches: they’d provide inspiration but they ultimately still required users to learn how to build apps with automations, databases, and UI.
But now, with the latest LLMs, Airtable has solved this problem by leveraging AI to do all the app building. The team realized that the solution to making app building easier was by creating a fully conversational, language-based interface called Airtable Cobuilder that would allow anyone to create an app without needing any technical know-how at all. Now, all a user needs to do is describe their process and requirements and voilà, they’ll get an app in seconds.
Anthony explained that he’s asking his team to consider how they can better leverage AI to build more impactful products and solve even more customer problems with greater efficiency. He predicts that soon customers will expect AI solutions to be the norm, just like mobile became the norm as we untethered from the desktop.
Again he stressed that agility and innovation were key, even predicting that companies that fail to adapt are going to be disrupted. Need more proof? Just look at the latest YC batch — he suggested, spotlighting that you’ll notice that nearly every new company is going after an incumbent category through AI transformation. Change is coming and companies will need to either disrupt themselves or be disrupted from the outside.
Trend 3: The rise of the “full stack” product manager
Anthony’s third prediction was perhaps the most personal for product practitioners.
He asserted that the core responsibility of product managers has always been about creating impactful products that drive business value. And yet, in practice, teams often become overly focused on inward-facing “product development” resulting in a loss of their original mission to actually drive the business forward.
He predicts the days of simply throwing products over the fence to the go-to-market teams are numbered. Instead, Anthony believes that an emphasis on revenue accountability will strengthen this trend, noting how over the last decade product-led growth has spotlighted the role of product in driving user acquisition and conversion into paying customers.
He reminded the audience that it was only last year when Airbnb’s Brian Chesky made waves by revealing that Airbnb had consolidated the roles of Product Management and Product Marketing, with PMs taking over ownership over not only the development of features, but also the marketing narrative, messaging, positioning, and overall business impact of those features.
He shared that Airtable recently updated the product org, with PM leaders taking accountability for revenue outcomes across the business. This radical shift required his product teams to adopt a whole new way of working, with PMs taking on a much deeper understanding of their competitive landscape and embedding them within individual deal cycles to really understand what was motivating individual buyers. The results? Profound. Anthony's team has shipped more products and increased growth while working under this new operating model.
AI will only accelerate this trend as it continues to streamline operations and provides the product function with more real-time access to data and customer insights. Anthony sees strategy ownership as a key evolution of this new full stack PM, and predicts that PMs will extend into marketing and go-to-market outcomes.
This redefined role will require a new kind of operating system for the product function. PMs will no longer just be living in OKRs and JIRA tickets, they’ll need to connect into upstream and downstream processes and systems such as Salesforce, Marketo, Snowflake and Databricks to truly understand how their products are being marketed, positioned, sold and used.
The final takeaway? Product leaders need to begin equipping their teams with the skills and tools to take on increased business ownership and accountability. The crowd in the room seemed to agree as he wrapped his talk and was peppered with nearly a dozen questions in the first minute of his Q&A, many of which were asking for tactical advice on how to encourage AI adoption and experimentation at the enterprise level.
As product leaders left the Summit, making their way back down the peninsula or out to SFO, one takeaway was palpable: The product orgs they manage are all at the precipice of massive operational transformation.
Airtable’s rising profile amongst product practitioners proves the platform is a clear and trusted guide to help CPOs navigate these disruptive waters. In the months ahead we'll take note if product strategy increasingly relies on AI. We’ll look for evidence that AI is accelerating category disruption cycles. And finally we’ll track if a new full stack PM will emerge as both a technical product leader and a narrative marketing storyteller. Since our current innovation imperative waits for no one, we’ll be looking out for massive product transformations enabled by AI to continue apace.
What is Airtable?
Airtable is the world’s leading no code app platform used by 80% of the Fortune 100 including companies like AWS, Walmart, HBO, Levis, Vanguard, and Nike. Top companies leverage Airtable to empower teams to build their most important workflows across shared data and to supercharge efficiency and automations with Airtable AI.
Listening to Anthony outline his predictions for the future of product operations it was easy to see why Airtable has become such a strategic partner for CPOs at some of the world’s biggest brands. The company's deep investment in AI is paying off and only accelerating their position as the leading no code apps platform as AI and digital transformation further takes over every corner of the market.